Torrington police issued an Amber Alert early June 30 for 1-month-old Shiloh Gilbert-Alfar and were also looking for her mother, Amirah Alfar. The alert was cancelled the same day after they were found safe in Arizona.
Contributed photo — Torrington Police Department

TORRINGTON >> A cross-country trek for the mother of an infant who fled her Connecticut home ahead of child welfare workers has led to the issuance of a local arrest warrant, police confirmed Tuesday. The woman could also face federal charges.

FBI agents, along with local police, found Alfar with her infant child leaving a convenience store in Prescott Valley, Arizona, miles away from the home of her grandparents, Christopher Ashe and Bonny Gilbert-Ashe.

The Register Citizen reported Monday that authorities are expected to arrest Alfar on a warrant charging her with felony risk of injury to a child. Her attorney, Michael Agranoff, said Alfar was planning to surrender to Connecticut authorities in the coming days.

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Until Tuesday afternoon, Torrington police declined to confirm it had issued an arrest warrant for Alfar.

Rousseau said, to his knowledge, Alfar was still in Arizona but expected back in Connecticut, possibly as early as this week. She remains at liberty, her whereabouts a mystery, with multiple law enforcement agencies saying Tuesday they didn’t have Alfar in custody.

“She has not been arrested,” Rousseau said. “She could still be [in Arizona]. I don’t know if she took a bus, or a train or a plane last night.”

A spokeswoman with the U.S. Marshals Office in Hartford said the agency didn’t have Alfar detained and referred questions to its Arizona branch, which didn’t immediately return phone calls.

A spokesman from Prescott Valley police said Alfar wasn’t in lockup and referred questions to the FBI, which was expected to question Alfar following her and the infant’s discovery last week in Arizona.

A Torrington police spokesman stressed last week Alfar wasn’t in custody or sought by authorities at the time.

That changed this week, with the issuing of a Torrington police warrant, and there’s the possibility the federal government could bring additional charges against Alfar after she and the infant were found last week by agents from the FBI and local authorities thousands of miles away from home following a multi-agency, multi-state manhunt.

Because Alfar fled from Connecticut and crossed state lines, she exposed herself to a federal indictment on similar charges, said Ed Adams, a former FBI agent who runs an investigative and security consulting firm in Fairfield.

FBI Special Agent Perryn T. Collier in Phoenix said in an email he wouldn’t discuss whether Alfar is being investigated by the federal government or if she was in the agency’s custody.

“I can neither confirm nor deny the FBI has taken Amirah Alfar into custody,” he said Tuesday morning.

The likely scenario, Adams said, is that Alfar is arrested and arraigned in Arizona on federal charges. He said it’s also possible she could be extradited to Connecticut, where she’d be handed over to federal authorities and prosecuted.

“This would put her into a federal status at this point,” said Adams, who spent nearly three decades as a special agent for the FBI in New York and Connecticut, handling cases on organized and white-collar crime and corruption. “Whether at some future time they defer and give it to local authorities, that’s something else.”

“Chances are they [the feds] would keep it, but you never know,” he said. “Nothing’s impossible.”

While police sort out criminal charges and extradition issues, attorneys for Alfar are busy trying to reunite baby Shiloh with family members.

Attorneys for Alfar filed papers in Torrington juvenile court last week asking a judge to appoint Gilbert-Ashe temporary guardianship of baby Shiloh. A hearing on the matter is expected in late July, followed by a conference in August.